Members

Felix Wichmann

Research: My laboratory investigates human perception combining psychophysical experiments with computational modelling. Currently we have four research foci: First, to improve our image-based model of early spatial vision. Second, to connect early spatial vision with mid-level vision: perceived lightness, brightness and contrast in relation to surface reflectance and illumination in images of real scenes. Third, we investigate differences and similarities between deep convolutional neural networks and human object recognition. Fourth, we explore connections between causality from a perceptual as well as a machine learning perspective.

Felix Wichmann received his B.A. (1994) and D.Phil. (1999) in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford. After post-doctoral research at the University of Leuven (2000-2001), he worked as a research scientist in the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen (2001-2007). From 2007 to 2011 he was Associate Professor (W2) at the Technical University of Berlin and since 2011 he is Full Professor (W3) at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Vision.

Extended CV Felix Wichmann

Felix Wichmann received his B.A. in Experimental Psychology (1994) as well as his D.Phil. (1999) from the University of Oxford. He was awarded his doctorate for the thesis Some Aspects of Modelling Spatial Vision: Contrast Discrimination under supervision of Bruce Henning. His education was supported by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (1992-1997), a scholarship from University College Oxford (1992-1994), and a Jubilee Scholarship from St. Hugh's College Oxford (1994-1997). From 1999-2001 he held a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College Oxford. After post-doctoral research in Johan Wageman's group at the University of Leuven in Belgium (2000-2001), Felix was a research scientist in Bernhard Schölkopf's Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany (2001-2007). From 2007 to 2011 he was Associate Professor (W2) for Modelling of Cognitive Processes at the Technical University of Berlin and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin. Since 2011 he is Full Professor (W3) for Neural Information Processing at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Tübingen. Felix served on the editorial board of Vision Research from 2011 until 2017, and he has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Vision since 2018.

Teaching Awards for the academic years 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17, Graduate Training Center, Tübingen, Germany presented by the GTC senior master students of the Neural Information Processing course.

Teaching Awards for the academic years 2012/13 and 2013/14, Graduate Training Center, Tübingen, Germany presented by the GTC senior master students of the Neural & Behavioural Science course.

Selected Article Award of the American Psychological Association (APA), Washington DC, USA, in 2002 for the paper The contributions of color to the recognition memory for natural scenes, with Lindsay Sharpe and Karl Gegenfurtner.

Silke Gramer

Uli Wannek

Research: Accurate measurements need an accurate experimental setup and precise control devices as well as reliable software. My interest is precision psychophysics and so I administer our pool of fine instruments and servers, help improving our psychophysics lab, and then am able to perform exciting experiments.

Uli studied Physics at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and received his Diplom (thesis in Universitäts Augenklinik Tübingen) in 1994. In 1999 he finished his PhD in Biology at the Max Planck Institut für biologische Kybernetik in Tübingen. From 1998 until 2011 he worked as an electronic engineer in the Institut für physikalische Chemie of the Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz. Since 2012 he is a Senior Scientist in the Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science at the Eberhard Karls Universität and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Tübingen.

Robert Geirhos

Research: Are human and machine vision relying on similar strategies for visual processing? I use psychophysical methods to better understand machine vision, and convolutional neural networks to model aspects of human visual processing. A current focus of my work is robustness: What can machine vision learn from the incredibly general robustness of the human visual system towards distortions of any kind?

Robert received a M.Sc. in Computer Science with distinction (2018) and a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science (2016) from the University of Tübingen. His studies were complemented by exchange semesters and research stints at the University of Glasgow (2015) and the University of Amsterdam (2017-2018). His PhD project at the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems is jointly supervised by Felix Wichmann (Neural Information Processing) and Matthias Bethge (Computational Vision and Neuroscience).

Bernhard Lang

Research: I am interested in the perceptual representation of physical objects and scenes in the human visual system. What are the perceptual properties that form the representation? How does the visual system compute these properties? In my current work, I investigate the perception of achromatic surface reflectance and illumination by combining psychophysical methods with images generated by modern computer-graphics algorithms.

Bernhard received his B.Sc. in Computational Molecular Biology (2015) from Saarland University and his M.Sc. in Neural Information Processing (2017) from the University of Tübingen. His PhD project at the Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience is jointly supervised by Felix Wichmann and Marianne Maertens (TU Berlin).

Kristof Meding

Research: How do humans and algorithms process causal information in vision? I develop new psychophysical methods to perform robust experiments, e.g. novel experiments to objectively quantify causal perception and apply the theory of causal inference to questions in cognitive science. My current focus is on the perception of the direction of causal flow. I study whether humans are able to perceive temporal causal relationships between objects.

Shaohan Li

MSc student @ NIP since 06/2018

Research: There are always different scaling methods for sensory or psychological attributes. Lightness refers to the perception of a concrete property of an object, and for the scaling of lightness perception, will the results appear the same if different scaling methods are applied? I’m currently focusing on the analysis of psychophysical approaches for the human visual processing.

Shaohan received a B.Eng in Electrical Information Engineering from the Peking University of Technology(2012), and started her Master study of Medieninformatik at the University of Tübingen in 2015. She is working on her Master thesis project supervised by Felix Wichmann(Neural Information Processing), concerning the comparison of different scaling methods(partition scaling and MLDS) of lightness perception.

Shuchen Wu

Lab rotation student @ NIP within the SMARTSTART Training Program since 03/2019

Sebastian Bruijns

Student research assistant @ NIP since 02/2019

Wiebke Ringels

Student research assistant @ NIP since 11/2018

Research:

During my Bachelor thesis as well as in my HiWi positions I worked with psychophysical experiments. In my thesis, I compared psychophysical methods regarding to behavioral biases of participants. Since then, I mainly program and run psychophysical experiments for different projects.

In the year 2018, Wiebke received her B. Sc. In Cognitive Science from the University of Tübingen. She wrote her Bachelor thesis at the Neural Information Processing group supervised by Thomas Wallis. Currently, she is studying Neural Information Processing at the Graduate Training Center for Neuroscience. Besides that, she is working as a HiWi for Felix Wichmann (Neural Information Processing) and Matthias Bethge (Computational Vision and Neuroscience).